Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Monday

Fact N°
2217

The U.S. military has commissioned a cheetah-like robot for a defense program.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the organization responsible for the forerunner to the internet, has commissioned both a humanoid and a cheetah-like robot. The commissions are to be completed within the next two years from the engineering company Boston Dynamics. The humanoid robot (named "Atlas") will be capable of biped-like locomotion, while the cheetah, imaginatively named "Cheetah," will initially be able to run up to 30 mph (though "there's no fundamental reason why it can't go as fast as the animals," according to the company's president, Marc Raibert).

Tuesday

Fact N°
2218

75 million users spend 200 million minutes every day playing Angry Birds.

That's a total of 16 years of avian revenge taking place every hour, according to Rovio, the small Finnish company behind Angry Birds. The game's popularity spans the globe -- "Angry Birds Day" on December 11, 2010, drew street gatherings in Jakarta and Budapest, and Israeli comedy show Eretz Nehederet did a sketch about the app. One sequel, "Angry Birds Rio," sold 10 million copies in 10 days.

Wednesday

Fact N°
2219

Stress makes women more perceptive of social cues, but men, less so.

University of Southern California researchers induced stress in experiment subjects by having them submerge their hands in ice water for three minutes (which stimulates cortisol levels) and then asking them, and a control group, to assess a series of facial expressions. While monitoring their subjects' brains, researchers found that men under stress showed less activity in a brain region associated with facial recognition than unstressed men did. Women experienced the opposite result. Neuroscientist Shelly Taylor suggested that this may be evolutionary behavior -- men experience a "fight or flight" response, while women, who would be unable to care for offspring if injured, instead "tend and befriend."

Thursday

Fact N°
2220

Exercise can lower your risk of death from prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, along with skin cancer: about one in six men will be diagnosed with it at some point in their lifetime. However, a study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that monitored 2,075 diagnosed men reports that men have a better chance of surviving the cancer if they engage in vigorous exercise. All men who engaged in at least moderate physical activity had a better chance of living through the 18-year study. Vigorous activity -- over three hours of exercise a week -- resulted in a 61% lower risk of death from prostate cancer itself.

Friday

Fact N°
2221

Owning a car costs about $10,000 a year.

Assuming a car is being driven 15,000 miles per year, the total cost of its operation and maintenance (gas, tires, fees, repairs, and so on) would be $9,641 per year, or around 53 cents per mile, according to an analysis by AAA. This figure was based on late 2006 gas estimates, however, when gas prices in the U.S. were dramatically lower per gallon (around $2.25 on average) than they are now (approximately $3.60). This per-year AAA estimate was also for a medium-sized sedan -- that 52-cents-per-year figure goes up to 63 or 67 cents per mile for a large sedan or SUV.

Saturday

Fact N°
2222

The faces of angry men are more noticeable than any others.

To both men and women, angry male faces "stand out" in a crowd of other faces; they are more immediately noticeable than angry female faces or other faces with other expressions. Furthermore, men are quicker to locate angry expressions of either gender than women are. The mechanism at work here is likely an evolutionary one (threat detection), and it takes place in the amygdale. The amygdale is also the part of the brain that associates social cues with value and directs our unconscious responses to what we experience, resulting in quick personal judgments.

Sunday

Fact N°
2223

Men are more attracted to women in red.

An assessment of five studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology determined that men were both more sexually interested in, and more generally attracted to, women wearing red than women who aren't. When shown photos of women in various colors (also including gray, green and blue), men were influenced by color only in those categories; their opinions on the women's personalities or intelligence were unaltered. Researchers suggested a twofold explanation, both societal (red is linked to romance through, for example, Valentine's Day) and evolutionary (increased blood flow is a sign of female fertility in primates).